Pirates of the Caribbean opened much bigger than expected: $70 million since Wednesday, which was even better than T3's performance over a holiday weekend last week. Disney claimed a stunning 98% rated it "excellent" or "very good" in exit polls. I love Johnny Depp, but just can't see spending the time on it. Still, nice to see him finally pull in some money. I'd hate to see him squeezed out of the pix.

And Rog showed a clip of him on "Rog & Fake Gene" just to point out how much he seemed to be chanelling a drag queen, which was right on the money, at least in that short clip. He's really something.

Meanwhile, the apparently-idiotic "League" matched expectations at $23m. (One sign that maybe it's not so bad afterall: On "Rog & Fake Gene," that imbecile Fake Gene really hated it.

Northfork did well platforming. Looks wonderful, except for the presence of James Woods. Can't the man afford an acting class? He's less believable than Harrison Ford. I have yet to see Woods on screen where I didn't just see the annoying actor Acting. From Boxoffice guru:

Opening well in platform release was the postwar drama Northfork with an estimated $61,364 from five theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago for a solid $12,273 per venue. The Paramount Classics pic will add nine more theaters on Friday and slowly roll out over the next several weeks.

This guest blogging thing really seems to be catching on. Seemed like a curious concept when I first heard, but it does seem like a win-win-win. The blogger keeps some of his audience from drifting, the guest gets exposed to a new audience, and the audience gets some fresh material they may or may not like while the blogger is away--and possibly the chance to discover someone new.

So this is an interesting twist. Howard Dean will be guest blogging all week for Lawrence Lessig, while he vacations. Seems to be the first incidence of a pres candidate guest-blogging. (Which is a quick trick, since there have been very few examples of a candidate blogging period--including Dean, really; very little of the man actually on his blog. Gary Hart tried it--barely for seven weeks during his exploratory campaign, then promplty dropped it but returned a few weeks ago at a once-a-week rate. His output was only slightly higher in the spring. I guess that's a blog. Sort of.) 

Dean on Lessig starts tomorrow (Monday). Could be interesting. Or not. Let's hope it generates something.

At the top of the hour, This Week hyped Will Wesley Clark Run? as one of the two main topics for the show. I don't know if the Rummy interview ran long (who really wanted to hear his bs that long?), or they were just doing a bait and switch. But the "discussion" clocked in somewhere shy of 30 seconds. At the end of a brief interview mostly about Iraq, George S. asked Clark if he would make the wishes of the two draft-Clark campaigns come true. He said he had not made a decision. When would he? About a month.

OK, we'll be waiting with bait breath. Could get really interesting if he says yes. But I'm betting against it. Seems more like a flirtation, doesn't it? And if he were really serious, wouldn't he have dived in while the calendar was still on his side? And it's not like he's holding down a regular job or anything.

(More sites on Clark and a possible run here (I just googled it for you.) If you feel like grovelling, either of these sites expedites the letter-writing for you.

I'm officially adicted. I stayed in last night, Saturday night, to get some work done, but work turned out to be messing around with my blog logo (yes, that thing up top that you may have mistaken for an ad). I spent 8 full hours on it, from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m.--23 different versions of in a Word directory, plus infinite variations and tweaking the graphic elements with MS paint. I don't have good tools, that's part of the problem.

And I'm torn. Is it better? I think so, but I've lost all objectivity. Please respond in the comments, or email me (you'll find buttons at the bottom of the left column or the bottom of the page). You people have not been participating in the comments, by the way, with a few notable exceptions, and you're really beginning to hurt my feelings. Just kidding on the hurt feelings, though I do aspire to more comments. And I'll ask directly this time: what do you think. If you can't bemember the old one, it's still up there on the top of this.

This all began when a friend said something like, "Logo? You have a logo? Oh that, I thought that was an ad." So let me know if you ever mistook it for one, and if so, if this decreases the chance of that. As we say in Chicago, Tanks.

Good God, now I've heard everything.

In his campaign to crush the Howard Dean insurgency, Robert's Virtual Soapbox cites Wednesday's NPR Talk of the Nation show on the Dem contenders, which apparently featured a few whacko pundits/consultants who have entirely lost their minds. Dem political consultant Neil Oxman  may or may not be right in parroting the DLC line that Howard Dean would be vulnerable to Bush. But this quote--assuming Robert got it right--just blows my mind:

'explaining that because he is from Massachusetts and fought in Vietnam, "Kerry can do that John Kennedy imitation" and can therefore pose a serious threat to Bush.'

(The inner quote is Oxman, the rest is Robert paraphrasing.) Also from Robert, again paraphrasing:

On the NPR program Sam Tanenhaus, contributing editor at Vanity Fair, also compared Kerry to JFK, noting that Kerry is a decorated Vietnam veteran and has a "patrician demeanor," adding that a "regal-seeming East Coast senator" could do well against Bush in 2004.

Have these men (Oxman and Tanenhaus) every heard Mumbles Kerry speak? I have admired Kerry, and I wouldn't mind seeing him president, and was leaning toward him early, and may go back there again. And he could prove viable, and the Vietnam thing is a huge plus for a Dem, as the foreign policy wuss factor always looms large over their heads. But a John Kennedy impersonation? That has got to be the worst politician comparison I have ever heard. What kind of moron thinks the main distinguishing characteristic of John Kennedy was his residence in the state of Massachusetts? (Next John Warner will be doing the Thomas Jefferson thing because he's from Virginia.) Why stop there, when the other similarities are so striking. John Kerry. John Kennedy. Coincidence? Yeah, you probably say the same thing about their initials. And the same initials as Jesus Christ, if you just go by pronunciation. Oh my God, it's the second Kennedy coming!

John Kennedy captured a spot in the American imagination by capturing the American imagination. He was charismatic and inspired a huge body of restless Americans. John Kerry is as far from that description as humanly imaginable. He has a lot of strengths, and at the moment I'd rate him as the second mostly likely person to grab the nomination, but if he does, it will be despite his anti-Kennedy persona.

God, the more pundits I hear speak, the more I wonder what planet they come from. Hmmmm. The planet of origin is not the problem, is it? They just tend to be simpletons. Why is that, exactly? Does the profession attract them, or just whittle down the field to those few? In a sound-bite world, the TV execs who make them stars are looking for goofballs who will lob out simplistic little one-liners--is that the root problem? Or is punditry just a lowly profession--a sideline peanut-gallery sort of role--which is never likely to attract much of the best and the brightest? I've worked in several fields, including journalism, and was deeply saddened to learn that journos just don't tend to be the brightest bulbs. Not a lot of dummies either, just a whole lot residents of that middle swath of the bell curve.

(Which is ironically very similar to what I sized up among my Basic Training peers in Army Infantry 20 years ago. (Irony alert! Irony alert! If I've pulled an Alanis, would the irony police please arrest me immediately. (In this rare instance, I am not being sarcastic.) The irony would be that soldiers and journos generally despise each other, yet in one significant sense, they're culled from the same swath of society: The Middlebrows! There, I've used that horrible word.)

That was the key identifying characteristic I discovered over those 14 weeks of Basic/Infantry training (and subsequent year, before I got sucked into officer candidate school and left the enlisted world behind). There was so much diversity there: black, white, brown, red, fat, skinny, hardass, softie, yankee, redneck, witty, dull . . . Really the broadest group I've probably ever encountered--the Army really does bring all kinds together. Except there was one overwhelming sameness about them that I couldn't put my finger on for the longest time. And finally it clicked one day, and was reinforced with every passing encounter over the ensuing months: they were all Middles.

This was the early 80s and recruitment was strong, so the Army had grown selective. To my great surprise, I learned that the high-school grad rate was around 95%, dramatically higher than the national average. And you couldn't just pass, there was an entrance exam, sort of a mini SAT, and if you didn't reach a certain score, you didn't get in, just like college. And the minimum was a lot higher than a lot of universities. So the dummies were all gone, but so were the smarties. That was the thing I missed most there: no intellectuals. No real deep thinkers. The Infantry, at least, was just not attracting those minds. No big surprise there. But it set up this really strange world, where everybody had something reasonable to add to a conversation, but no one had anything spectacular. (Generally, of course.) Hence the weeks of trying to get a handle on it: in some ways the conversations felt so much richer than what I was used to at University of Illinois, yet never quite reaching the loftiest levels. Always better than the bad days at university, never as good as the good ones.

I spent a good chunk of the next 15 years as a computer consultant and management consultant (for EDS and Arthur Andersen), which got me inside a vast number of companies in a wide variety of different fields. I worked with insurance agents, oil drillers, religious foundations, rental car companies, hospitals, car makers, ocean tankers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, television programmers, blah blah blah. And I never experienced another profession that remotely reminded me of those soldiers, except for one: journalists. Truly. A great big profession of middles--with a slightly bigger dollop of dummies and an equally large sprinkle of smarty pants. But not many. How very odd.

(I must pause to point out here that the officer corps does not fit that description in the slightest. Nearly all my liberal friends assume the military is composed exclusively of dunderheads, and the sitcoms and fillums certainly portray them that way, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Air Force Academy is more selective than Harvard, for instance. And then it's up or out for 30 years, and they keep whittling down from there--and driving off a lot of creative people and nonconformers in the process, so they have a pretty narrow-minded group in some respects, but a pretty damn smart one. Most journos I know would be appalled to hear that on average, we're a whole lot dumber than the average army officer, but I'm afraid it's true.)

Have I gone entirely astray? The point that drove me to write this was not that one moron mistook John Kerry for John Kennedy, but the laughably simplistic analysis I hear from nearly every member of the pundit class. Simpletons Simpletons Simpletons! All I ever hear discussing politics on TV are Simpletons. With a few rare, and notable exceptions. Same thing in the New York Times, I'm afraid.

Is it just that they have so little to talk about, or is it that they're all talking to each other? Or they just weren't all that bright or creative or insightful to begin with? Or they get bogged down in the details and completely lose sight of what's really going on with the electorate? I'll actually cut them a lot of slack for that last one. God knows I have that problem with any problem I ever worked on. That's actually the chief reason I was able to make a contribution as a consultant. In some ways were we just grifters, but there really is something to the idea that a fresh set of eyes can see right through the fog that gradually builds up all around us in the world we live the bulk of our lives inside. Pundits never tire of mentioning that de Tocqueville grasped the essence of America better than any American precisely because he was peering in from the outside. But they never seem to learn from it. They are probably way too lost in all the Kerry details to grasp what a liability his charisma-free character is likely to be.

So take some time off guys, split your time with a different field, insist on sabbaticals for the top performers . . . I don't know, you figure it out. But this current system is not working. All it does is produce an army of simpletons, spouting preposterous comparisons like John Kerry to John Kennedy. Enough.